I guess the first thing is I could give you a little bit of a resume, but I always feel like I was super lucky. My first job after getting a master's degree in computer science was at Microsoft, and at the time, it was kind of the best place in the world to be, everybody got an office, I didn't have to wear a suit to work, they had free drinks and snacks, things like that so I felt very lucky right out of school and having a master's degree in computer science there weren't as many choices as there are today. So I think students that you're talking to you right now the world is at their feet in a lot of ways, there are so many different options. So I started working at Microsoft in 1995 and then, the main thing that I was trying to do was to gain experience. I always thought of my job or my path is like, How can you gain capability? And how can I learn and become more valuable to this company or to the industry in general? So I also thought of it somewhat selfishly in terms of what can I get out of this opportunity? And so I would typically go toward the biggest fires that I could find. What I mean by fire is something that is in crisis or that needs my help and it's something that I know how to do but I also see a big opportunity in that work. So I had seen upside it could be something that I could parlay into bigger opportunity later at I did that a Microsoft for many years I would find fire and I would jump in, I would solve that problem, build a team or build the tech for that thing, and then that would earn me a new opportunity to do a bigger job and I did that for 11 years there. Then I moved to Google, my last project was at Bing at Microsoft and Bing was awesome but I also realized that if I wanted to be where the action was on the Internet at the time in 2005 it wasn't at Microsoft. Microsoft still wasn't really understanding the Internet so I think that that is a part of a career journey where you have to make choices about where to go, and sometimes they're pretty dramatic like you have to leave your company or you have to leave the group that you're in order to go where the important things were happening. I felt at the time that Google really is understanding the Internet and distributed systems and was thinking about how to build applications on the Internet. So really thinking about the cloud and the importance of data and how to manage that? So when I got to Google, I realized that their infrastructure was probably a decade ahead of where Microsoft was at that time, it was a good decision for me to move there and there I worked on infrastructure database problems still, very much computer science focused but at that point I had become a manager and was leading larger teams, did many projects of google flu trends, which is probably a top of the one given growing the virus right now we would predict where flew was going to occur based on people's theories and trying to correlate those to the CDC hospital visits so we could pretty much predict, like how the flu was going to roll out. We had prediction models, and at some point, that project fell into disrepair and was killed off after I left Google but we sure probably could use it today, even a corona the but the kind of the last project I did at Google was this thing called Google WiFi, which was hardware product that with the number one selling master router or I think it might still be but the thing that I did there was really focusing on the customer so if I think in addition to kind of going towards opportunities that are really important are being selfish about investing in yourself, I think there's also like putting the customer first is really important and so if you look for things that will really change the world in some way sometimes they're things that people have already tried but have failed to do successfully. Routers, I would say was at that time, like three years ago, was an industry that had become very complacent and had stopped thinking about customers. I was inspired because I was watching my in-laws trying to set up an old router it was just a disaster so I convinced Google, and I almost kind of tricked them into doing it. I didn't really ask for permission, I just started a project with a few people and we developed a very rudimentary router and started to think about what would we do to differentiate it? We decided that innovation was really on the software side. So could we create a cloud-based controller? It would allow us to often lies the home router experience with WiFi to produce something that was genuinely different and much better, very easy to set up, very human-friendly and added a bunch of features on top that allowed people to do things that they couldn't do, like turn off the Internet during dinner time or be able to approve kids access to certain websites on the fly, things that router just did not do at the time. So, I think that's another component really putting the customer first and if you're going to innovate, find an area that hasn't moved. If you look at the world that happens all the time, like I would consider Tesla as an example of that, Tesla really did a car that was really novel and interesting. Like Facebook did it with social there are a lot of social at the time, and Facebook was able to come up with a twist on social, which was really interesting and different. Google did it with search, Microsoft did it with PC software. So where can you really change things are often where things are broken, I would say, and I've been attracted to areas that needed someone to help fix broken stuff and then when you look at the problem, you have to look at it from a new perspective, a lot of people, smart people have been there before you. So what are you doing that's going to be different that can really change the way that the solution and so that's where the customers come in is talking to them really understanding the main points and then trying to solve them in a novel way that hasn't been done before. I think that being an innovator is a hard path, after Google, I felt like I had done everything I wanted to do at Google with the router and that success on that project. And I moved to a small startup called Plangrid, which was building construction software, and I didn't really know anything about construction software, but they really needed me, and it seemed like an interesting area, and again it was one of these areas that is the construction which is very paper-oriented. What they were doing is moving plans onto the cloud so that literally everybody on a construction site could be on the same page so people will upload plans and then we would bring them down to a device, even a phone like an iPhone or a pad and then people could mark them up on the pad and those would be shared in real-time with the whole community looking at that one page. So we did virgin controlling a lot, it was a whole document version control product but the interesting thing there was that instead of trying to solve, how do people deal with more paper and plans on a construction site? The solution was, could we digitize all of them and use things like machine learning and new devices that were coming out to make construction cheaper, more efficient and easier instead of having people have to go every time they have a change and you can imagine on these big construction sites like you see a big building being built. Sometimes there are a dozen, maybe 100 different companies doing different aspects of those projects so there is a company doing plumbing and electrical and cement, and they'll step on each other's work and Plangird it allowed them to streamline that it was used at big construction sites, and it ended up that auto desk who makes CAD purchased them for $875 million about three years ago. So being an innovator that took eight years for the founders to get to that point on, I just joined the journey of the very tail end but finding those areas where customers really need you and solving a real problem for our industry is a good way to run your career, and it's kind of what I've tried to do. And then I came to Amazon and I've been here for two and a half years. I work in the brand advertising business, and so we are the number three advertiser in the world now, and we perform better than Facebook and Google, and we have a lot of insights into customer behavior, and we try to help customers find products that they care about and they're interested in, so using data deep learning, machine learning techniques that's kind of a high level of philosophy and a little bit of thinking about how I got where I did. And as I said, some of its luck and some of its serendipity of being open to opportunities and then jumping on them when they exist. I think that's a part of it like being ready to really change and do something quite different with yourself when those opportunities come up and listening to that instinct inside of you that says like there's a better thing for me, there's a better match, there's more interesting for a project that I could go do, I think it's part of the challenge. A lot of people don't do that, but they play it safe, they stick with what they know, they kind of work in the same area for a long period of time and I think that it has its benefits because you become an expert but I also think that you can get neglected as an employee in that situation because you're like the person who's been there. I don't want to be at a company where I've been there for the longest amount of time and knows more than anybody. I always want to be learning and feel like I'm changing the way that it is rather than maintaining if that makes sense.

The Vice president of ads means I manage a part of Amazon's ad business so the ad business is large at Amazon. There are different groups, I manage what's called brand advertising and I am in the performance advertising group. So we focus on things that help people buy a product and so the responsibilities that I have, I have a number of programs that I run. One is called sponsored brands so when you go to search and you search your product and you see the very top slot is probably the most valuable pixels in e-commerce that sponsored brands and what we do is we try to pick a product that is very relevant to the customer's query, something that is going to be interesting to them because we only get paid if someone clicks and so we have an auction that we run, which has sometimes thousands of participants, different advertisers who are bidding for you as a customer, and we use a bunch of attributes like how interested would you be as a customer to click on that? How relevant is that product for you? How relevant is that in the query that you just ran? And we try to make a prediction that you'll find that ad interesting enough to click on it then we tune that model over and over again, using deep learning and machine learning techniques, and we train it with literally thousands of attributes and let the machine kind of sort out like, what's the most important thing that will predict whether that customer will be interested in that product and then we reinforce it with user behavior so again, we put the customer first because without them and without having something that's highly relevant and valuable, we can't make any money and neither does the advertiser. So it doesn't do us any good to just put random advertising up in front of people. We really do want to help the advertiser and the user, the shopper to find the products that they want to. So I have a team that's in three different sites that do different things, mostly in Seattle. We also have ah site in Palo Alto. and we have a site in New York City at Hudson Yards. Hudson Yard is also built using Plangrid, which is a kind of interesting that there are buildings now that was built by my previous company's product. I typically spend normal office hours, except right now, actually, everybody at Amazon is on work from home, So I'm at home and everybody in the company is working from home because the Coronavirus outbreak was right in our area. It's about a mile away from where I live is where the epicenter of the whole thing is so Amazon had everybody head home. So we're testing out how, this virtual work situation will fly for literally 30,000 people, so it'll be interesting. But typically, I spend a normal amount of time like I would say, 9 to 6 or 9 to 5. I try to have time to think so I think the main thing isn't how many hours you work, but how you spend your time and so more and more I'm focused on having time to think about the future and think about what I'm doing and it helps me get clear on what's important and not important because in a job when you first get your job, you're going to be busy all the time and I think it's really important to not be busy. It's important to do smart work and to put your energy in the right places so a company can drive you crazy with the number of different things it wants you to do and the amount of time they want you to spend on things and I think it's really important for an employee to step back and say, like, I actually need to think you hired me to be an intelligent human being here, So I'm not going to pack my schedule up with meetings, I'm not going to spend all my energy running around. I'm going to spend my time thinking and doing so think about the beginning of the week, I tend to think about what am I trying to accomplish this week? What are the things that are coming up in the next months, in the next six months, that I really need to start working on and then way have a lot of mechanisms that help us stay on track so setting goals, aligning teams to those goals, making sure they understand what we're trying to do. The other thing, I tend to try to live near where I work, so I don't have a long commute when I worked at Plangrid, I had to commute for 45 minutes each way on, I found that to be exhausting. Now I live about 15 minutes from work and I work from home rarely, I mean, during this Coronavirus thing, I'm going to do it for over a month but I tend to go into the office because I think that face time with people and being able to see them and talk to them in the hallways is very valuable so teams that work in a distributed way like our teams in New York and Palo Alto, I think have a need a little bit harder time than teams that work altogether. But even teams that work in adjacent buildings have the same issue of communication so I think you just got to get out there and meet people and make sure your present, I do try to be in person wherever whenever I'm in a meeting, I try not to be on video. As far as working from home, I do that sometimes. I think you can work yourself to death if you do that too much and so I have a family, I have your kids that are all into different things, and I need to spend time with them to have dinner, so there are family dinner nights, and so I think to have a balance between your work and your family is really important and there should be time set aside for both of those not just to work yourself to death and nobody is going to give you an award like I actually get a post on Linked In about this that I posted my ratings at Google for my whole 10 years, it was like it exceeds expectations or strongly exceeds and once in a while, I would meet expectations which is fine. It's like there's nothing wrong with meeting expectations then I put that side by side with a picture of my family. If I think about the value of those two things side by side, my family is infinitely more important than whatever I was trying to achieve in terms of my reputation or in terms of the scores that I was trying to do, now fine you have to do well in your job and you want to make money and you want to be recognized for those things and you may want to get promoted but on the other hand, long term those things there are going to be very fleeting and the most important thing or the relationships you create and that you feel supported that's just one learning after doing this for 25 years, that the short term work is a lot less important than the long term relationships that you build.

I work with all different titles but my peer group mostly are Director, Vice Presidents but I meet with a lot of teams, and I do a lot of group meeting and group meetings where sometimes I'm the most senior person there and where I'm leading or responding to the things that are being said, and sometimes I'm a participant in those, and sometimes my boss's boss is leading those things. I would say, I have to switch gears quite a bit as a leader from being a participant to being a leader sometimes, a lot of it I have to do on my own like I have to be a protagonist within the company to get things done and so one thing I do is I will consciously set up meetings with groups where we're having trouble. So the first thing I do is I try to have a relationship with the other leaders first so in general, you want to have a relationship with people before you fight with them before you have conflict and so I think it's really important to introduce yourself and to be a known quantity to them so they trust you at least they know who you are. Then, if we have conflict, to stage that conflict in a way that is beneficial and so that people don't feel defensive or threatened but we're trying to solve something together and in a large organization like Amazon, there will always be conflicting priorities and conflicting resources that are going to be applied to something that's just the way that I've always seen things go in Google and Microsoft. You have a lot of people who are trying to do the right thing, but they need someone to help them make a decision and so that's a lot of what I try to do is help solve problems like that conflict between teams, disagreements around priorities, around the timing of things so the way that is most effective is I like people to solve their own problems if they can, and so that might sound like a stupid idea by going back to this whole idea of ownership you want to empower people to solve these problems because, with that, they'll gain experience and build confidence that you can go and solve a bunch of problems that you thought that I needed to solve. I don't need to solve the problems, you can do it on your own and we're developing leadership in people who can do a lot more for the company if we do that and so a lot of what I try to do is to balance stepping back as a leader to allow people to solve the problem on their own and when I do need to give clarity, what I do is I consciously do it by starting off with, like, a straw man proposal so all write up my ideas and I'll say this is just a draft, it's just a straw man, now I believe that these ideas are correct and I'm very open to hear and debate about them so let's have the debate. If you have alternative ideas, we can talk about those things, but this is what I think we need to do and then people will come in and they'll say, Well, what about this? And you haven't thought about this enough, then I think part of being a leader is also integrating that feedback in and so it's not just about telling people what to do that never works like it doesn't work for me. I try to treat people like I want to be treated like I want my opinion to be asked, I want to have my opinion considered and so a lot of it is speaking about the strategy for how to solve these things. So how do you convince somebody? The best way to do it is that they feel like they're a part of the solution, they either came up with the idea or they were collaborators on that idea. Even if you came in at the beginning and conflict, you exit with them feeling like they could contribute to that problem. So, ideally, that's what I'm always shooting for and it takes a lot of work actually to get good at that, I would say at first, I was very conscious of how to do it, but I couldn't do it unconsciously, I couldn't do it by just walking into a meeting and kind of reading the room and being able to do it, I would have to think through, What's my strategy? How am I going to talk to people about it? Who are the people that are going to be really negative towards me, who are going to be positive, and now it's much more natural but it took a long time to do it and I think it's something that you've got to practice and it's something that you should try to put yourself out there and fail at it and learn, the more decisions you make, the more you try to get people to agree or to align, the better you get at it